A biography for Zaha Hadidhasn’t been written yet.
“My father was a socialist, so he would have thought that I shouldn't be a dame.”
“I miss aspects of being in the Arab world - the language - and there is a tranquility in these cities with great rivers. Whether it's Cairo or Baghdad, you sit there and you think, 'This river has flown here for thousands of years.' There are magical moments in these places.”
“I think that the training of architects allows you to see what will happen ten years ahead of time, or twenty. It's not guessing, it's not intuitive, it's based on research - and we may be wrong.”
“I am quite sensitive to politics, because you know, as an Arab, an Iraqi, all your life, you are very conscious of it.”
“Education, housing and hospitals are the most important things for society.”
“Life in the Middle East is quite different from other places.”
“I made a decision when I was in school that I'd have a lot of male friends.”
“Architecture is unnecessarily difficult. It's very tough.”
“When I was growing up in Iraq, there was an unbroken belief in progress and a great sense of optimism. It was a moment of nation building.”
“I always thought I was powerful, since I was a kid.”
“In hospital, people should be able to have time to themselves.”
“You don't always have to show art in what's called a white box; you can have a kind of complexity within an exhibit which actually respects the art as well.”
“Women are always told, 'You're not going to make it, its too difficult, you can't do that, don't enter this competition, you'll never win it,' - they need confidence in themselves and people around them to help them to get on.”
“I will never give myself the luxury of thinking, 'I've made it.'”
“I like music. Country, hip-hop, R&B, sometimes classical.”
“The spirit of adventure to embrace the new and the incredible belief in the power of invention attracted me to the Russian avant-garde.”
“I don't think that architecture is only about shelter, is only about a very simple enclosure. It should be able to excite you, to calm you, to make you think.”
“People in power, they're so used to people kind of playing up to them.”